Walker

Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013. He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.

The Anti-Growth Mentality Behind Zoning Laws

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I’ve mentioned the economic impact of zoning laws here before. A recent article in The New York Times continues to highlight how detrimental these laws can be:

These days, you can find…people who moved somewhere before it exploded and now worry that growth is killing the place they love. But a growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth sentiment, when multiplied across countless unheralded local development battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy. It has even to some extent changed how Americans of different incomes view opportunity. Unlike past decades, when people of different socioeconomic backgrounds tended to move to similar areas, today, less-skilled workers often go where jobs are scarcer but housing is cheap, instead of heading to places with the most promising job opportunities, according to research by Daniel Shoag, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and Peter Ganong, also of Harvard.

With the recent shootings in Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Dallas, arguments over police brutality and black crime have started once again. Though it might sound odd, in many cases zoning laws provide background for the tensions between law enforcement and black communities.[ref]For example, one can see the impact on the black community in St. Louis from the maps here. Journalist Radley Balko provides context in an incredible article for The Washington Post here.[/ref] As the article explains,

Zoning restrictions have been around for decades but really took off during the 1960s, when the combination of inner-city race riots and “white flight” from cities led to heavily zoned suburbs.

They have gotten more restrictive over time, contributing to a jump in home prices that has been a bonanza for anyone who bought early in places like Boulder, San Francisco and New York City. But for latecomers, the cost of renting an apartment or buying a home has become prohibitive.

In short, it’s just another form of tribalism making its way into local laws:

[W]hen zoning laws get out of hand, economists say, the damage to the American economy and society can be profound. Studies have shown that laws aimed at things like “maintaining neighborhood character” or limiting how many unrelated people can live together in the same house contribute to racial segregation and deeper class disparities. They also exacerbate inequality by restricting the housing supply in places where demand is greatest.

The lost opportunities for development may theoretically reduce the output of the United States economy by as much as $1.5 trillion a year, according to estimates in a recent paper by the economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti. Regardless of the actual gains in dollars that could be achieved if zoning laws were significantly cut back, the research on land-use restrictions highlights some of the consequences of giving local communities too much control over who is allowed to live there.

“You don’t want rules made entirely for people that have something, at the expense of people who don’t,” said Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

How (Not) To Be Secular: A Lecture by James K.A. Smith

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Years back, Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor published his 800+-page tome A Secular Age. I actually checked it out from the library once, got about 15 pages into it, and didn’t pick it up again until I had to return it. I realized that it was something I’d have to spend a lot of time not only reading, but chewing on. Given that I was still a newly-married undergrad, I decided to revisit it at another time.

I still haven’t tackled Taylor’s book, but I did recently complete James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Smith’s book acts as a summarized walkthrough of Taylor’s, illuminating and at times taking issue with the some of ideas presented. By reading Smith’s book first, I feel prepared to take on the entirety of Taylor. In short, Smith and Taylor argue that the Western world has become a disenchanted one in which belief in God is just one option of belief among many:

A society is secular insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested). At issue here is a shift in “the conditions of belief.” As Taylor notes, the shift to secularity “in this sense” indicates “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”…It is in this sense that we live in a “secular age” even if religious participation might be visible and fervent.[ref]Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, pg. 20.[/ref]

Shifts towards secularization led us to see ourselves as free agents closed off to external meaning, influences, and forces. Social ties and hierarchies were no longer seen as being grounded in higher, sacred orders. Reality was no longer a cosmos full meaning and purpose, but merely a universe full of chaos and chance. The secularity of the modern age is inescapable even for the most ardent believer. But this isn’t a subtraction story (i.e., the loss of superstition) as much as it is a change in sensibilities; a change in the water we swim in so to speak.

I’m certainly not doing the book justice in my brief summary, so I’ll just say this: anyone interested in making sense of our secular age, but hesitant to read 800 pages on the subject, should check out Smith’s book. You can see him lecturing at BYU’s Wheatley Institution below.

The Food Industry’s Dirty Secret: DNA

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Does DNA = Frankenfood? The American public seems to think so. As reported in The Washington Post,

Last year, I wrote about an Oklahoma State University survey indicating that over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.” A new study written by economists Brandon McFadden and Jayson Lusk (who also helped author the OSU survey) similarly finds that 80% of the public support labeling of foods containing DNA (though in this case the question does not clearly indicate whether the labeling should be mandatory or not). Katherine Mangu-Ward has some additional discussion of the study here.

Obviously, such DNA labels would be absurd. Nearly all food contains DNA, and there is no good reason to warn consumers about its presence. As McFadden and Lusk and explain, the survey answers on this subject are an indication of widespread scientific ignorance, proving that many of the respondents “have little knowledge of basic genetics.” Other data from the study also support this conclusion, including the fact that 33 percent of respondents believe that non-GMO tomatoes do not contain any genes, and 32 percent think that vegetables have no DNA. Our vegetables would be blissfully free of DNA if not for the nefarious corporations who maliciously insert it into the food supply!

The authors note that the proportion of respondents who support labeling of foods containing DNA is very similar to the percentage who support mandatory labeling of GMO foods (84 percent).

The unintended consequences of DNA…

Something often missed in the debate over mandatory labels is that “”free” information is not really free at all. Labels cost money. Those costs will often be passed down to consumers. They also take up the time of consumers, and potentially divert their attention away from more valuable information. Mandatory labeling of substances that are not actually risky can also mislead people into thinking that a threat exists even where it does not.”

Given our previous posts on GMOs here at Difficult Run, you can imagine that I wasn’t too thrilled about this information.

 

Cosmopolitan or Global Elitist?

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Over at The New York Times, Ross Douthat has a fairly damning piece on so-called cosmopolitans:

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires real comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes it cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.

The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and at as members of a tribe.

They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups (evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise.

Here’s to you, global citizen.

But the sledgehammer comes toward the end:

They can’t see that the paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.

The whole thing is worth reading and reflecting on (especially given my own snobbishness).[ref]To be clear, this isn’t a condemnation of actual cosmopolitanism. It is a condemnation of a tribe of elites who have attempted to hijack the word to help boost their own sense of moral superiority.[/ref]

The Uncertainty of Brexit

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Over at The Washington Post, GMU law professor Ilya Somin has a great piece on Brexit that touches on similar points I made in my first post on the subject. After taking a look of political theorist Jacob Levy’s fantastic arguments against Brexit, Somin makes several important observations:

  • “First, he implicitly assumes that the UK will not become significantly more pro-free market than it was before Brexit. If you think that a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson or Theresa May will adopt much more market-oriented policies than it did in David Cameron, then its possible that the leaving the EU will facilitate such reforms. So far, however, I see little evidence of any such free market revolution in the offing.”
  • “Conversely, it is also possible that, even if the EU has not made British economic policy much more interventionist so far, it might have done so in the future had Britain voted for Remain.”
  • “Finally, it is possible that free trade and migration will be preserved intact if Britain joins the European Economic Area – the so-called “Norway option” favored by some Brexit proponents. EEA membership requires free trade and migration for EU citizens, and would also subject the UK to many (though not all) EU economic regulations. From a libertarian standpoint, the Norway option retains most of the good features of the European Union, while freeing Britain from at least a few of the bad ones. “

In short,

there is still a lot of uncertainty over the long-term impact of Brexit. But Jacob’s analysis should at least give pause to those who expect that Brexit will lead to a more libertarian Britain, or a more free-market Europe more generally.

 

Revolutionary Leaders and Mass Killings

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Revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass murder than nonrevolutionary leaders according to a new study by political scientist Nam Kyu Kim. While this may not come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to history, it’s always nice to have confirmation. The abstract reads,

This article argues that revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass killing than nonrevolutionary leaders. Revolutionary leaders are more ideologically committed to transforming society, more risk tolerant, and more likely to view the use of violence as appropriate and effective. Furthermore, such leaders tend to command highly disciplined and loyal organizations, built in the course of revolutionary struggles, that can perpetrate mass killing. This study uses time series cross-sectional data from 1955 to 2004 to demonstrate that revolutionary leaders are more likely to initiate genocide or politicide than nonrevolutionary leaders. The violent behaviors of revolutionary leaders are not limited to the immediate postrevolutionary years but also occur later in their tenure. This demonstrates that the association of revolutionary leaders and mass killing is not simply indicative of postrevolutionary instability. This article also provides evidence for the importance of exclusionary ideologies in motivating revolutionary leaders to inflict massive violence.

The full paper can be found here.

 

Social Progress: Wealth Matters, But Isn’t Enough

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The Economist recently reported on the latest index from the Social Progress Imperative, which measures various indicators (ranging from nutrition and basic medical care to access to basic knowledge to personal rights) under three major headings: (1) basic needs, (2) foundations of well-being, and (3) opportunity. The index finds that “generally the richer a nation is the more socially progressive it is.” While there are obvious exceptions and even first-world problems (such as obesity), the correlation is pretty clear:

SPI3

The chart demonstrates that GDP isn’t the end all, be all. Yet, even though the addition from Business Insider above the chart is certainly true, it’s the kind of platitude rich people tend to employ. When one is writing as a member of the richest 20% of the world’s population,[ref]A single adult with no children making $12,331 annually (the poverty threshold in the U.S. for a single person household) is in the richest 13.5% of the world’s population. A single adult with two children under 18 making $19,096 annually (the poverty threshold) is in the richest 16.8 percent. See how you rank at Giving What We Can. In other words, talking about poverty in absolute terms matters.[/ref] the claim begins to appear pretty vacuous. I’m reminded of economist Herbert Gintis’ response to Michael Sandel’s criticisms of the market economy: “By focusing on the marketability of particular things, Sandel misses the larger effect of an economy regulated by markets on the evolution of social morality. Movements for religious and lifestyle tolerance, gender equality, and democracy have flourished and triumphed in societies governed by market exchange, and nowhere else.”[ref]For an absolute demolition of Sandel, see Jason Brennan, Peter Jaworski, Markets Without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests (New York: Routledge, 2015). Also check out my post “The Capitalist Conscience.”[/ref]

Wealth may not be enough, but let’s not undersell its importance. And let’s especially not do so in order to undermine policies that can lead to greater economic growth.

Was Brexit Inevitable?

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A blog post over at the American Enterprise Institute has some interesting quotes from a couple French interviews with Cambridge historian Robert Tombs on the Brexit situation. Tombs believes, “In 100 years, historians will say that Brexit was inevitable.” He suggests that Britons

are very attached to the political mythos of decisions being made, in the end, by the people — that is the idea that legitimizes the referendum. The Magna Carta of 1215 is the basis: it obliges a king to obey his people. Such a mythos does not exist in countries like Germany, France, or Italy, where crucial decisions are more often made by an elite, whether it’s the Jacobins, Bismarck, or the Risorgimento. Each time, a small group changes the course of national history and the rest of the country is called to follow.

The European Union’s reaction to Brexit

Elsewhere, he states,

In voting by a large majority to Leave, Britons did nothing other than live out a history that has seen them regularly take distance from the continent and even try to keep it divided.

The fact that the UK clearly voted this week in favor of leaving the EU was a shock the world over. The markets, obviously surprised by the vote, were taken over by a panic; journalists and the media are too petrified. But if we observe this episode in the longue duree, Brexit was not astonishing; future historians can well consider this an inevitable event. As she has done multiple times in the past, Great Britain is going to have to renegotiate her relationship with her neighbors and the rest of the world. And since that has happened multiple times in the past, we know this will lead to many internal divisions and many potentially hurtful conflicts.

Check out the full post for more of Tomb’s thoughts on the history of Great Britain and its relation to Brexit.

Doubts & People

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Keeping it short this week with a few quotes that stood out to me.

Bruce R. McConkie’s talk touched on “two commissions—on the one hand to teach the doctrines of the gospel, and on the other hand to testify by personal knowledge that we know that the things that we are proclaiming are true—” that, in his view, lead to “two premises”:

On the one hand we are obligated and required to know the doctrines of the Church. We are to treasure up the words of eternal life. We are to reason as intelligently as we are able. We are to use every faculty and capacity with which we are endowed to proclaim the message of salvation and to make it intelligent to ourselves and to our Father’s other children. But after we have done that, and also in the process of doing it, we are obligated to bear testimony—to let the world know and our associate members of the Church know—that in our hearts, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit to our souls, we know of the truth and divinity of the work and of the doctrines that we teach.

He explains that he does not mean to “minimize in any degree or to any extent the obligation that rests upon us to be gospel scholars, to search the revelations, to learn how to reason and analyze, to present the message of salvation among ourselves and to the world with all the power and ability we have; but that standing alone does not suffice…We have to put an approving, divine seal on the doctrine that we teach, and that seal is the seal of testimony, the seal of a personal knowledge borne of the Holy Ghost.” I’ve briefly written on doubt elsewhere and I think we need to be very careful with what I call “I knowism” in the Church. The tension between increased learning or continual revelation and spiritual certainty is a paradox within Mormon culture. There has been an increasing amount of pastoral works on dealing with doubt within Mormonism over the years, but unfortunately I think most are only aware of popular Church publications that disparage doubt. Some even use President Uchtdorf’s plea to “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith” as nothing more than a battering ram against doubters meaning “you can’t have doubts.” While I agree with McConkie’s premises of knowing the doctrine (which is itself a slippery term, but I won’t go into that) and bearing testimony of it, I think we need to be careful not to overprescribe the need for intellectual certainty. As I’ve been reading through James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, this profound insight by Taylor should be taken into consideration when we discuss knowing and belief:

A society is secular insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested). At issue here is a shift in “the conditions of belief.” As Taylor notes, the shift to secularity “in this sense” indicates “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace”…It is in this sense that we live in a “secular age” even if religious participation might be visible and fervent.[ref]Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, pg. 20.[/ref]

The cultural conditions (at least in the West) are different than that of ancient times. Approaches to how we discuss belief and spiritual knowledge may need to be too. Nonetheless, study with the Spirit. And then testify of what you’ve learned.

Moving on.

Elder Paul H. Dunn highlights a similar point made by author Michael Austin last year at By Common Consent:

We [Latter-day Saints] pride ourselves on making sure that everybody in our community has a calling, or a well- defined place–one that both facilitates, and constrains, one’s interactions within the community. The highly correlated nature of both the Church’s organization and its curriculum means that most people in it have a pretty good idea what they are supposed to do in their callings, what they are supposed to teach in their classes, and how they are supposed to interact when they visit each other’s homes.

The downside of all this organization is that it is entirely possible to confuse categorical relationships for real human connections. One is moderately important to program development; the other is the main reason we exist.

Home teaching, visiting teaching, fellowshipping, and curricular correlation are valuable programs, but programs aren’t the same thing as relationships. We must be careful not to mistake one for the other—to think that somebody who has been through training has been educated, or that somebody who has been assigned a visiting teacher now has a friend. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the development of meaningful human connections is the belief that, through our institutional attachments, we already have them. It is a simple and ordinary belief, to be sure, which is precisely why it is so terrible.

Elder Dunn confirms this line of thinking when he states, “I understand from what the Lord has revealed to us through the prophets that people are his greatest concern…Programs, then, wonderfully inspired programs, like the Sabbath, exist to help people. If we are not careful, it is very easy to put the mechanics of the program ahead of the person. Jesus was constantly trying to put the spirit back into the letter of the law. Our first priority, I feel, as parents, leaders, and teachers should be the individual within the home or Church program.”

Never forget the point of the program is people.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Brexit: “What Comes Next?”

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[ref]Props to Brad Kramer for nailing the perfect Hamilton reference in his comments on the outcome. I completely and unshamedly stole it.[/ref]

What comes next?
You’ve been freed
Do you know how hard it is to lead?

You’re on your own
Awesome. Wow.
Do you have a clue what happens now?

 

Economist Emily Skarbek makes an important observation following U.K. voters’ decision to leave the European Union:[ref]Get caught up with The New York Times, Vox, and The Economist.[/ref]

No one knows just how this is going to play out. The longer horizon will depend on the course that is chartered in policy negotiations and positions adopted by the UK.

Many of the people I have discussed this with in academic and policy circles want a freer, more open society. This led some to vote remain and others leave, based on divergent predictions about which course of action would lead to a more open society. I take this as one reason for optimism amidst the fear.

The aftermath of this vote will require a broader coalition of liberals to push for an open trade and immigration policy. Trade policy that is crafted in the next few years will be crucial to the economic impact of Brexit. Britain desperately needs policy entrepreneurs, City of London, and leaders in Parliament to craft a solution that maximises openness to counter the populist, nationalist, and collectivist sentiments that may have got us here. It is hard to see this now, having just voted to leave the EU single market.

It seems that many of the “Leave” supporters were driven by the influx of immigrants over the last decade or so. In other words, xenophobia quite possibly led to the Brexit vote. It could also very well be that most didn’t know what the hell they were voting on. Furthermore, the uncertainty can (and is) lead(ing) to economic chaos worldwide. However, it is interesting that younger voters were more in favor of remaining. While they may have been saddled with a future they didn’t want by those going to their graves, this could also mean that the long-term future of Britain is in fact not nationalistic and xenophobic and far more open and liberal. As some supporters of both liberal trade and migration have noted, the EU has helped establish both in Europe. Some are optimistic about the vote. As the Cato Institute’s Marian L. Tupy remarked, “Moving forward, there is no reason why nations committed to entrepreneurship and free trade should not prosper outside of the EU. Switzerland has done so in the past and Britain can do so in the future. By showing the rest of Europe that it is possible to live in prosperity and peace outside the suffocating confines of the EU, Britain will lead the way for other nations – including Denmark, France, Holland and Sweden – that wish to regain their sovereignty and chart their own course.”[ref]You can read Tupy’s more in-depth analysis of the European Union here.[/ref]

The question is whether or not Britain will be “committed to entrepreneurship and free trade” (I’d add liberal immigration policies). The answer will ultimately determine the long-term outcome of Brexit.